Angelique Kerber saved a match point in the first round of the 2016 Australian Open and won the title anyway, beating Serena Williams 6-4, 3-6, 6-4, the first woman to take a major after saving match point in round one. The season kept building: a Wimbledon final, Olympic silver in Rio, the US Open, and in September the No. 1 ranking at 28. The game behind it was pure counterpunching, a left-hander sliding low into the corners and turning defence into flat, angled winners.
She beat Williams again in the 2018 Wimbledon final, in straight sets, for the last of her 3 majors, one each in Melbourne, New York and London. She finished with 14 career titles and 34 weeks at No. 1, then stepped away in 2023 to become a mother, returned in January 2024, and made the Paris Olympics her farewell. Even the exit was defiant: a quarterfinal against eventual gold medallist Zheng Qinwen that ran to a deciding tiebreak, Kerber saving three match points before the end.
2014. That is the year Madison Keys won the first title of her career, at Eastbourne, and on Saturday she won the same tournament a third time, beating Tatjana Maria 7-5 6-4 without dropping a set all week.
Match tale